[Thomast22]

Building on the recognition of the importance of information transmission, accumulation and processing in biological systems, in 1978 Paulien Hogeweg, coined the term "Bioinformatics" to refer to the study of information processes in biotic systems.[1] This definition placed bioinformatics as field parallel to biophysics and biochemistry. Examples of relevant biological information processes studied in the early days of bioinformatics are the formation of complex social interaction structures by simple behavioral rules, and the information accumulation and maintenance in models of prebiotic evolution.

At the beginning of the "genomic revolution", the term bioinformatics was re-discovered to refer to the creation and maintenance of a database to store biological information such as nucleotide sequences and amino acid sequences. Development of this type of database involved not only design issues but the development of complex interfaces whereby researchers could access existing data as well as submit new or revised data.